Keelway
Free Chrome extension

Vet the carrier without leaving the email.

Highlight an MC or DOT number in Gmail, click the badge, and a side panel opens with operating authority, insurance on file, safety scores, and the specific reasons this carrier is or is not risky — straight from public FMCSA data.

Add to Chrome — free

Works in Gmail and Outlook on the web. Right-click lookup anywhere else.

See the Keelway platform
  • Free· no seat limit
  • No account· no credit card
  • Public FMCSA data
  • Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc

Highlight the number. That's the whole workflow.

No tab, no login, no copy-paste into SAFER. The panel opens beside the email with the record already pulled — and when the record is bad, it says so before you send the rate con.

mail.google.com
Truck for your Laredo → Atlanta posting
dispatch@summitlinelogistics.com · 2:14 PM

Afternoon — we've got a 53' dry van empty in Laredo tomorrow morning and can cover your Atlanta load.

We run under MC# 5551234 / DOT# 4442211 — Summit Line Logistics. What's it paying all-in?

CarrierVet found 2 numbers — click to vet
CarrierVet
Carrier
SUMMIT LINE LOGISTICS LLC
MC# 5551234 · DOT# 4442211
Contact
Phone(555) 010-4477
AddressLaredo, TX 78045
Fleet
Power units26
Drivers24
Authority & insurance
Authority age3 months
Common authorityInactive
Insurance on file$0 of $750,000
Risk factors
  • No active operating authority
  • Insurance on file ($0) below required ($750,000)
  • Authority granted less than 6 months ago
  • Phone number shared with 4 other carriers in FMCSA records
High risk — 2 critical flags

Illustrative — the carrier above is fictional.

Everybody knows they should check. Nobody has three tabs to spare.

An MC number lands in your inbox at 4:40 on a Friday with a truck ninety minutes from the shipper. Checking it properly means SAFER in one tab, Licensing & Insurance in another, and a BASIC lookup in a third — so under cover pressure, most brokers glance at the authority status, decide it looks fine, and tender the load.

CarrierVet collapses those three tabs into a highlight. The lookup happens where the MC number already is: in the email.

How it works

Three ways to start a lookup.

Install it and it works. There is no setup step, no API key to paste, and nothing to connect.

Highlight

Highlight an MC or DOT number

In Gmail or Outlook on the web, select the number in a carrier's email. A badge appears over the selection — click it and the profile opens in the side panel.

Right-click

Right-click on any site

Select an MC or DOT number anywhere — a load board, a rate con, a PDF preview — and choose "Vet carrier" from the context menu.

Search

Type it into the panel

Open the side panel and search an MC number, a DOT number, or a company name directly. No email required.

Auto-highlight works out of the box on Gmail (mail.google.com) and Outlook on the web (outlook.office.com, outlook.live.com). Everywhere else is right-click, or opt in to all sites in the extension’s options.

The side panel

A carrier that clears, and the same lookup on a shell.

The left-hand carrier is fourteen years into its authority with clean insurance and no overlap with anyone else. The right-hand one has twenty-eight trucks under an authority that is four months old, two insurance cancellations, and a phone number that appears on four other carriers’ FMCSA filings. Both look identical in an email.

CarrierVet
Carrier
MERIDIAN HAULING LLC
MC# 1234567 · DOT# 7654321
Authority & insurance
Authority age14 years
Common authorityActive
Insurance on file$1,000,000
Cancellations (36 mo)0
Safety
Safety ratingSatisfactory
Crashes (24 mo)1 · 0 fatal
Vehicle Maintenance34th pct
Cross-checks
Phone / email / addressNo overlap
Low risk — no flags
Example — a carrier that clears
CarrierVet
Carrier
APEX FREIGHT SOLUTIONS LLC
MC# 9876543 · DOT# 3456789
Authority & insurance
Authority age4 months
Power units28
Insurance on file$750,000
Cancellations (36 mo)2
Cross-checks
Phone numberShared with 4 carriers
Email addressShared with 6 carriers
Risk factors
  • Authority granted less than 6 months ago
  • 2 insurance cancellations in the last 36 months
  • New authority with an unusually large fleet — possible reincarnated carrier
  • Phone number shared with 4 other carriers in FMCSA records
  • Email address shared with 6 other carriers in FMCSA records
Medium risk — 5 flags
Example — the same lookup on a shell

Both carriers above are fictional and the MC numbers are placeholders. We do not print a real MC number next to a risk verdict.

What you get, per carrier.

Every field below is click-to-copy where it makes sense — the point is that the carrier packet fills itself while you read.

01

Identity

Legal name, DBA, MC# and DOT# (click-to-copy), cargo classes, and a flag if the entity also holds broker authority.
02

Contact

Physical address, contact name, email, phone and cell — every field click-to-copy, straight into your TMS or carrier packet.
03

Authority & insurance

Authority age, common/contract authority status, insurance on file against the amount required, the insurer's name, the policy's effective date, and any cancellations in the last 36 months.
04

Safety

FMCSA safety rating, crashes and fatal crashes in the last 24 months, and a BASIC score for every FMCSA category the carrier has inspections in. Out-of-service rates aren't a panel field — they feed the risk factors when they run above the national average.
05

Risk factors

A Low / Medium / High level, plus the specific reasons behind it — not a black-box number.
06

Cross-checks

Whether this carrier's phone, email, or address turns up on other carriers' FMCSA filings — the fingerprint of a chameleon carrier.
The risk engine

21 rules, and it shows its work.

5 of the rules are critical: no active operating authority, an active out-of-service order, an unsatisfactory safety rating, insurance filed below the amount the authority requires, or FMCSA flagging the entity as not allowed to operate. Any one of them forces a High rating on its own. The other 16 are weighted minor findings — new authority, shared contact details, insurance cancellations, BASIC scores over the intervention threshold — and a weighted total of two or more points lands the carrier at Medium.

You always see the factors, never just a number. A carrier can be High-risk and still be the right truck for the load — that is your call to make, and you should be able to see exactly what you are overriding. Every rule is written out in plain English here.

Provenance

Where the data comes from, and how old it is.

All of it is public FMCSA data. Some of it is live; some of it is a month old, because that is how often FMCSA publishes it. You should know which is which before you lean on a field.

FMCSA QCMobile API

Operating authority, safety rating, crash history, BASIC scores, cargo classes

Queried live on lookup

FMCSA Licensing & Insurance (L&I)

Insurer name, policy effective date, insurance cancellations, authority grant and revocation history

Queried live on lookup

FMCSA Company Census

Contact details, address, power units, drivers, reported mileage

Refreshed monthly

FMCSA SMS inspection & violation files

Peer-group percentiles and violation rates behind the BASIC scores

Recomputed monthly

FMCSA stopped publishing property-carrier SMS percentiles in 2017. The percentiles CarrierVet shows are computed from FMCSA's public inspection and violation files against peer carriers with a similar inspection count. They approximate FMCSA's methodology — they are not the official score, and the panel labels them as such.

Privacy

The only thing we see is the number you look up.

When you vet a carrier, the MC number, DOT number, or company name goes to Keelway and a profile comes back. That is the whole exchange. The content of your email, the page you are on, the sender’s address, your subject lines and your customer names never leave your browser. There is no account, so there is no profile of you to build, and the extension does not track your browsing.

Read the CarrierVet privacy policy or see how Keelway handles data across the platform.

Honest limits

What CarrierVet does not do.

You are going to find these out in the first ten minutes anyway. You may as well find out now.

Chromium only

Chrome, Edge, Brave and Arc. The extension uses the Chrome side panel API, so Firefox and Safari are not supported.

Auto-highlight is Gmail and Outlook

The badge over a selected number appears on mail.google.com, outlook.office.com and outlook.live.com. Everywhere else — load boards, rate cons, carrier websites — you right-click and choose “Vet carrier”, or opt in to all sites in the options.

A name search returns the top match

Search by company name and you get the single best match, not a list to pick from. When two carriers share a similar name, search the MC or DOT number instead.

No AI summary yet

The panel has an AI summary button behind a “Pro — coming soon” badge. It is not available today, and we would rather say so than let you find a disabled button.

Percentiles are an approximation

FMCSA stopped publishing property-carrier SMS percentiles in 2017. Ours are computed from the public input files against peer carriers with a similar inspection count, and the panel labels them that way.

Carriers only

No broker bond checks, no shipper screening. Those live in Freight Check, a separate Keelway extension. CarrierVet does one job.

When one at a time stops scaling

CarrierVet checks one carrier. Keelway checks the whole inbox.

Spot-checking has a ceiling. You post a load, forty carriers reply, and you are not going to highlight forty MC numbers — you are going to vet the three you like and take the cheapest of those. The one you did not vet is the one that re-brokers the load.

The Keelway platform reads every reply to a posted load, vets each carrier against the same FMCSA data and the same risk rules you see in the extension, ranks them by trust, rate and history, and drafts the reply in your voice. It is $799 a month, flat, with no per-seat pricing — the carrier check on every reply is in that core plan, not an add-on. Fraud Shield, at $199/mo, is the deeper layer on top: carriers that rebranded after a bad MC, fake-MC quotes, look-alike domains, and rate confirmations that got intercepted.

Nothing about that requires you to stop using CarrierVet, and CarrierVet stays free either way. Watch the platform demo if you want to see it work on a real inbox.

Frequently asked questions

Is CarrierVet really free?+
Yes. CarrierVet is free to install and free to use — no account, no credit card, no sign-in, and no seat limit, so you can put it on every desk in the office. The only cap is an anti-abuse limit of 30 lookups a minute per IP address, which no human vetting carriers by hand will ever hit. It is free because it is the front door to Keelway's paid platform, not because it is a trial that expires.
What data does CarrierVet use?+
Public FMCSA data only. Operating authority, safety rating, crash history, BASIC scores and cargo classes come from the FMCSA QCMobile API. Insurer name, policy effective date, insurance cancellations and authority grant/revocation history come from FMCSA Licensing & Insurance. Contact details, address, power units, drivers and reported mileage come from the FMCSA Company Census. There is no private database and no scraped third-party list behind it.
How fresh is the data?+
Authority, insurance and safety are queried live from FMCSA on each lookup, with a 24-hour server cache. The company census fields — contact info, address, fleet size, mileage — are refreshed monthly. The BASIC percentiles are recomputed monthly from FMCSA's public inspection and violation files. CarrierVet does not claim real-time or continuously refreshed data, because that is not what the underlying FMCSA feeds are.
Does CarrierVet read my email?+
No. The extension looks at the text you highlight and nothing else. The only thing that leaves your browser is the MC number, DOT number, or company name you actively look up. The body of the email, the sender's address, your subject lines and the rest of the page never reach Keelway's servers. There is no account, so there is nothing to tie a lookup to you.
Does it work outside Gmail?+
Yes, by right-click. Auto-highlight — where a badge appears over a selected MC or DOT number — works out of the box on Gmail, outlook.office.com and outlook.live.com. On any other site, including load boards and rate confirmations, select the number, right-click, and choose "Vet carrier" from the context menu. If you want auto-highlight everywhere, you can opt in to all-sites mode in the extension's options.
Can I look up a carrier by company name?+
Yes, from the search bar in the side panel — but be aware that a name search returns the single top match, not a list of candidates to choose from. If two carriers have similar names, search by MC or DOT number instead. That is the only way to be certain you are looking at the entity that emailed you.
What is a chameleon carrier?+
A chameleon carrier is an operator that shuts down a motor carrier with a bad safety record or unpaid claims and reappears under a brand-new MC number, often at the same address and phone. CarrierVet surfaces the fingerprint: authority granted less than six months ago, an unusually large fleet for a new authority, and a phone, email or address that shows up on other carriers' FMCSA filings. It does not accuse — it shows you the overlap and lets you ask the question.
How does the risk level get decided?+
The risk engine runs 21 rules against the FMCSA record. 5 of them are critical — no active operating authority, an out-of-service order, an unsatisfactory safety rating, insurance filed below the required amount, or FMCSA flagging the entity as not allowed to operate. Any single critical finding forces a High rating. The remaining 16 are weighted minor findings, and a weighted total of two or more points lands the carrier at Medium — so one heavier finding, like a phone number shared with three other carriers, is enough on its own. The panel always lists the specific factors, so it is never a black-box score.
Does CarrierVet check broker bonds or screen shippers?+
No. CarrierVet vets motor carriers, full stop. Broker bond checks (BMC-84) and shipper screening are a different Keelway product, Freight Check, which is a separate paid extension. Keeping CarrierVet to one job is deliberate — it is the check a broker actually needs to make before a truck picks up.
Does it work in Firefox or Safari?+
No. CarrierVet is a Chromium extension and it uses the Chrome side panel API, so it runs in Chrome, Edge, Brave and Arc. Firefox and Safari are not supported.
Do I need a Keelway account to use it?+
No. Install it and start vetting — there is no sign-up screen, no email capture and no onboarding flow. A Keelway account is only relevant if you later move to the paid platform, which is a separate product with its own login.
Free · No account

The next MC number that hits your inbox, check it.

Install takes about fifteen seconds. There is no sign-up, no card, and no seat limit — put it on every desk in the office.

Add to Chrome — free

Works in Gmail and Outlook on the web. Right-click lookup anywhere else.

Related